Wake The Happy Words

After four months inhabiting a limbo-like swathe of farmland in northwest Iowa, we’re finally here, across the pond in Oxford, a bit bleary-eyed and still battling to cleanse our modest one-bedroom flat of its former occupant’s “dude”-ness, but here still, and happy to say it.

We arrived a week ago Monday morning to find BMI (British Midland Airways) had lost all four pieces of our luggage, roughly 50 pounds a piece or 200 pounds total in clothes, books, electronics, toiletries, and medicine. We slept in our clothes that night hoping the luggage would show up next morning. No such luck, thus we spent Tuesday bathroom accessorizing and clothes shopping. Turns out The Gap UK has the best prices on cheap clothes for guys, but then I’m the sort of fashionista who’d wear a paper sack if it came in a size 34 waist and 32 inseam.

The flat itself is fashionable in exactly the way you’d expect a hundred-year-old flat to be. It’s right off Abingdon Road and Sunningwell in southwest Oxford, straddling a nest of flats to the west and a couple of broad, sloping parks and sports fields and what we think is a “garden-share” where people can rent small plots and tend their own produce year round. It’s about a two mile hike north to the city center and Oxford University itself, a journey that takes just a couple minutes on a bike. We grabbed two solid steel frame city bikes with metal wire baskets bolted to the back, which puts a pragmatic ceiling on grocery shopping, since you have to “think with your basket” instead of your stomach.

Biking around the city’s certainly an experience. Everyone knows the Brits drive on the left–bikes too–which is tougher than it sounds when you’re trying to parse street signs, lane markings, hand signals, and where you’re supposed to stop in a traffic lineup (not to mention that it’s slightly surreal turning right from the left hand lane). You also have to keep your distance from the high curbs, because it’s easy to catch your pedals on the down-rotation. The space between cars and curb is only a few feet, so you’ve got to be on the ball, or used to it. I’m not even close. We’ll get there eventually, or end up sampling the socialized healthcare system early.

Can I say how much I’m already impressed with the British public news system? I’ll give it a year or more to get right and properly annoyed, but so far the BBC World Service is so much calmer than anything in the States (save for Jim Lehrer). I don’t mean less interesting or tedious. Just that it may yet be possible to have interesting, respectful, massively watched newscasts that don’t feel ratings-compelled to pander to the lowest common gladiator.

More dispatches shortly.